Treasury Committee presses regulators for answers over Google Cloud outage

Treasury Committee chair Dame Meg Hillier has demanded the UK’s financial regulators explain their response to Tuesday’s Google Cloud outage, in the first major test of the new critical third party (CTP) regime that brought big tech suppliers under regulator oversight.

Within hours of the outage, Hillier wrote to Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey and Financial Conduct Authority chief executive Nikhil Rathi asking nine questions, Computer Weekly reported, with an initial response demanded by 4 November and full details by 20 January 2027. She asked when the regulators were first alerted to the problem and by whom, for details of the cause, and how many finance firms and customers were affected.

A power problem in Google Cloud’s London region knocked out banking apps, the courts’ video platform and delivery networks across the UK on 20 October. Financial firms affected included Revolut, Lloyds Bank, HSBC, Barclays, Bank of Scotland, NatWest, Halifax and Nationwide. Google said a “power event” in the europe-west2-b availability zone was the cause, and the disruption was largely mitigated the same afternoon.

The inquiry comes three months after HM Treasury designated the local operations of Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Oracle as critical third parties — the first time the FCA and the Bank of England have powers of investigation and enforcement over non-financial tech firms supplying critical services to the UK financial sector.

“The Bank of England, the Prudential Regulation Authority and the Financial Conduct Authority (the authorities) all have a role in implementing the critical third party regime,” Hillier wrote.

The Times separately reported that the questions from Hillier followed disruption at banks, Royal Mail and the NHS, and that the outage also affected the courts service’s cloud video platform used for some remote hearings. Reuters reported that the European Banking Authority has also contacted Google Cloud to assess the impact on EU financial entities.